Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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The Gift of The Gifts of Imperfection

The Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown

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“Understanding the difference between healthy striving and perfectionism is critical to laying down the shield and picking up your life. Research shows that perfectionism hampers success. In fact, it’s often the path to depression, anxiety, addiction, and life paralysis.” This is one of those books I wish I had as a young girl. Perhaps I wouldn’t have picked up on all of the intricacies and layers then that are understandable only with development and years of self-discovery; however, this may have helped to lay a […]

“A Table of Alphabetical Hard Words”: Our First English Dictionary

The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson

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Quite a bit has changed since this book was written; language has changed, attitudes towards language have changed, and culture overall has changed. Some pieces from this book have not aged well; it’s rather dismissive of some languages and cultures (weirdly judgmental over Japanese writing, for example) while being aggressively defensive of others. There is also little-to-no attention paid  to the many additions given to English by marginalized communities; I was surprised to come across very little about the contributions of people of color have […]

Men Are Terrible and Cannot Be Trusted

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

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Ghost Wall is a story about Sylvie, a seventeen year old girl, dragged along on an Iron Age reenactment in northern England with her father, Bill. Bill’s enthusiasm for the Iron Age is a hobby; he isn’t traditionally educated in the subject, and jumps at the opportunity to join Professor Jim Slade and his students for what is essentially a two-week summer LARP. He brings his wife, Alison, and his daughter, Sylvie, along for the ride. It becomes obvious early in the novel that Bill […]

The Americas Deserved Better Than Guns, Germs, and Steel

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

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After watching John Leguizamo’s Netflix special Latin History for Morons, I felt a duty to learn more about the Hemisphere in which I live. I started with Mr. Leguizamo’s strongest recommendation: 1491, a 560-page tome with multiple appendices. The author isn’t a historian or archaeologist but a journalist who synthesizes all manner of information and makes it accessible.  The result is so compelling, so dense and riddled with shocks big and small that I suspended my usual speed-reading. Unexamined assumptions that I wasn’t even aware […]

Culture Shock

First Fieldwork: The Misadventures of an Anthropologist by Barbara Gallatin Anderson

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First Fieldwork was an assigned reading when I took Intro to Anthropology in college. That was a good 15 years ago, and since then I’ve reread this book probably five times. It’s short, it’s interesting, and it’s hilarious. Barbara Gallatin Anderson recounts a fieldwork assignment in the tiny fishing village of Taarnby, Denmark. She and her husband are there to study the changes that urbanization is making to the culture of the small town. To this non-anthropologist, that sounds dull as dishwater, and I’m guessing […]



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